I seldom use the words "moral imperative," and, when I do, they carry behind them an urgent necessity for rational individuals to respond to an imminent threat to the inalienable rights of man. In this Presidential election, however, I see a clear moral imperative to defeat the power grab of a man who would endanger the sacred liberties of every man dwelling in America, but especially of the most autonomous and industrious among us. I shall enumerate, in brief, a horrid threefold menace that a would-be Kerry administration poses to our freedoms across the board.

Kerry's national health insurance program will destroy consumer choice

Never mind that Kerry's debate speeches apologetically stressed that buying the government-sponsored coverage will not be mandatory. The effect of his proposal on consumer choice remains devastating. By establishing a plan to provide insurance to all those willing at below market price, John Kerry's policy will draw customers away from those private insurance firms seeking to remain competitive on the market. These firms will be faced with the same choice that was presented to private schools intended for the lower and middle classes when the public education behemoth was first established: either continue to interact with customers of low to average means and operate at a loss, or narrow the company's market to wealthy consumers who are willing and able to pay far greater amounts of money to avoid becoming entangled in a wasteful and inefficient government program. Since the government is guaranteed revenues through taxation, it has no incentive to compete with private firms, and, no matter how innovative and cost-efficient a private entrepreneur will be able to make his program, the government will always be able to muster the resources to artificially suppress it. This mechanism is, of course, carried out to the detriment of all taxpayers, including and especially the wealthiest among them, who are forced to fund the vast majority of the government behemoth. Thus, Kerry's plan will lock the vast majority of Americans into a nightmarish bureaucratic labyrinth, while amplifying the financial burdens on those wealthier individuals who struggle to rally their productive efforts to escape it. All will have their rights of property and consumer sovereignty infringed upon at an unprecedented level.

Kerry staunchly opposes any plan to privatize Social Security

While President Bush has remained open to the idea and even listed it as one of the pillars of his proposed "ownership society," Kerry has openly and blatantly stated that he will categorically oppose any attempts to mitigate the current pyramid Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, the scheme that pretends to give each workers their own retirement accounts, but in fact merely redistributes the money collected from them to today's pensioners. The Social Security system operates on the Marxist calculus of need as the standard of value, ability as the standard of payment. Those who are most productive and earn the most money must also pay the most to fund those who did not exercise sufficient financial prudence to embark on a retirement free of government handouts. The Social Security system assumes in productive Americans the obligation to support those who were unable or unwilling to save, precisely because they were unable or unwilling to save, and the prerogative to penalize those who earn their pay, precisely because they earn it. Moreover, the Social Security system expropriates from individuals money used to fund layers upon layers of inefficient bureaucrats, which would not have existed under free-market retirement plans, thus draining from every worker some amount of money he could have preserved for his later use instead. Under the guise of "securing" Americans' retirement, this disastrous scheme undermines it, in direct proportion to its perpetration of its disgraceful pretense.

Kerry will forcefully enlist individuals as fodder for the collective

A plank which had appeared on the official Kerry campaign website but now has mysterious vanished reads:

As President, John Kerry will ensure that every high school student in America performs community service as a requirement for graduation. ... However, John Kerry does not believe in unfunded mandates. No state would be obligated to implement a service requirement if the federal government does not live up to its obligation to fund the program.

Farewell, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness! According to John Kerry, these exist not as rights, but conditional privileges, contingent on some mandatory amount of unrequited individual sacrifice to his community, city, or country, to some collective whose value inherently exceeds that of the individual's life, and whose only reward for the individual will be the lifting of a threat to terminate that young high school student's aspirations for a sound education and a secure career. Moreover, not only is the student, his life, and his time, to become fodder for the shapeless "collective unity," but every working individual will be forced to fund this wanton sacrifice by means of money which the Federal Government would expropriate from him to facilitate its enforcement.

Does it now surprise the perceptive among us that S. 89 and H.R. 163, the recently defeated proposals to reinstate the military draft, which uses the same collectivism as lurks behind compulsory community service programs to justify coercing innocent youths into making the ultimate sacrifice, were proposed and sponsored by Senator Fritz Hollings and Representative Charles Rangel, prominent members of the Party of Kerry? Does it now not arouse suspicion that, while President Bush, in the debates, categorically rejected the possibility of a military draft, Kerry, using circumlocution to avoid a direct answer, managed to suggest that he would increase America's military by 40,000 personnel? In an all-volunteer force, how does one spontaneously conjure up an additional 40,000 troops? Given Kerry's fundamental ideological support for the individual's liberties as contingent upon service to the "greater good," he will not hesitate to meet this promise by means of conscription.

John Kerry's danger to individual freedom extends far beyond the three aforementioned issues, yet, even their exposition alone suffices to demonstrate the moral necessity of defeating this man's designs on the executive office. If you do not wish to be compelled, at gunpoint, to surrender your money and time to fund somebody else's health insurance, somebody else's retirement, somebody else's reception of "community service," somebody else's bureaucracy, and somebody else's death, you will elect a President who has asserted his categorical opposition to these schemes. Despite my many disagreements with George W. Bush, I consider it a moral imperative to support him in this election, for it is my liberty that I am securing thereby.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to The Autonomist, Le Quebecois Libre, and Objective Medicine. He is also Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the Western principles of reason, rights, and progress. Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's newest science fiction novel, Eden against the Colossus here.